{"id":152815,"date":"2019-03-13T10:51:28","date_gmt":"2019-03-13T14:51:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nothingbutnylon.com\/?p=152815"},"modified":"2021-10-13T16:54:12","modified_gmt":"2021-10-13T20:54:12","slug":"mark-edwards-iv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nothingbutnylon.com\/mark-edwards-iv\/","title":{"rendered":"A Tale of Mark Edwards IV: Leaving a Legacy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Editor\u2019s Note: Mark Edwards was the head men\u2019s coach at Washington University in St. Louis from 1981-2018, amassing 685 career wins, 34-straight winning seasons from 1984-2018, 20 NCAA Tournament appearances, three Final Fours (2007-09) and two national championships (2008, 2009). This is the fourth and final installment of our series on him. We encourage you to take the time to also read <\/strong>Part 1<\/strong><\/a>, <\/em>Part 2<\/a><\/em><\/strong> and Part 3<\/a><\/strong>, all chronically over his coaching career.<\/em> Mark Edwards stayed at WashU for 37 years. If that sounds like a long time, it\u2019s because it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s common for coaches to move up the ladder, bouncing around programs after a handful of years with the hope of ending in their dream position. But what if everything you wanted was already in front of you? What if you had already achieved the dream? \u201cOne of the questions people often ask me is, why were you there for so long? My answer is, why not?\u201d Edwards said. \u201cI had a perfect platform for my philosophy. I had a perfect support system. We had two chancellors the whole time I was there, and one athletic director who hired me was with me for 34 of those years. I had no reason to leave.\u201d He said opportunities are a two-way street, and he never pursued any other position while at WashU. If asked if he was interested in elsewhere, he would say no. He\u2019s confident he could have left if he wanted, but he was happy where he was, even when times were tough. \u201cMy ambition was to prove that we could win national championships at Washington University. They provided me that opportunity,\u201d Edwards said. \u201cDid I think we were going to win? I had to, because if I didn\u2019t, then I would be a phony. I would be standing in the locker room in 1982, I told those guys that our goal was to win a national championship. And perhaps at first it was like, \u2018Oh, yeah right,\u2019 but by the time they graduated, and every kid graduated, they really believed they had that opportunity. I think this, to me, was so important that my program was defined this way. So yeah, we were discouraged. I never once thought about leaving for that reason, and I think I\u2019m very comfortable and confident that I\u2019ve made the right decisions, did the right things and lived a life that was consistent with what I was trying to get our players to do.\u201d In 1977, Edwards attended a clinic with Al McGuire as a speaker. During his speech, he made a comment that you can\u2019t win with smart kids. That stuck with Edwards, and it influenced his decision to take the WashU job in 1981. He wanted to prove McGuire and anyone who nodded their head at that speech wrong. \u201cThat served as a little baseline for me to start thinking about because I like smart kids,\u201d Edwards explained. \u201cI like kids who are inquisitive. I always enjoyed academics. I always enjoyed athletics. I always believed you could combine the two.\u201d It was tough sledding to start, though. It took 27 years to build WashU from scratch into a national champion. That means nearly three decades of seasons ended unsatisfactorily and 26 teams that didn\u2019t reach the mountain top. Between winning the second national championship and retiring, nine more teams needed consoling at the end of the year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The disappointment can be difficult for coaches and players to bear. \u201cWhen it happens, the emotions of it is like it\u2019s do or die. It is grieving,\u201d Edwards said. \u201cYou learn how to handle it. Can you apply that to your real life? It\u2019s not going to lessen the impact of it, but it will at least strengthen your resolve to get through.\u201d Through his career, Edwards realized what sports are and how the emotions they bring, positive and negative, can be used as a guide for his own life and the lives of his players. \u201cI try to keep it in perspective by recognizing this fact: sports are manufactured crisis,\u201d he explained. \u201cYou set playing rules, and you set a goal of what you\u2019re trying to accomplish. You create an emotional situation that makes a crisis, and you either do it or you don\u2019t. \u201cThen, you walk away, and nobody died. There are no kingdoms lost. There\u2019s no financial ruin. You lost a game. But you suffered the same emotional crisis as people in life that they\u2019re going to face. When you hear coaches say that we are really just giving life lessons, what they\u2019re really saying is we are preparing ourselves emotionally to deal with crises we\u2019re going to face in life by manufacturing crises through sport.\u201d Although winning a championship can be the goal, Edwards said people need to understand there\u2019s success in the middle ground. Your goals can be lofty, but you need to aim at something attainable first and work your way up. \u201cYou don\u2019t necessarily have to get the championship to make a championship run,\u201d he said. \u201cSometimes I think we throw out roles. We say, \u2018You can be anything you want to be and do anything that you want to do.\u2019 But there has to be some other blurred line there, and that line is, if you make good decisions and pick wisely what you\u2019re going for. \u201cFor instance, I remember once I was at a camp. I was talking about setting goals and pursuing things, and this little kid came up to me after the camp and said, \u2018I\u2019ve set my goal.\u2019 I said, \u2018Oh really, what is your goal?\u2019 And he says, \u2018my goal is to be a 7-footer.\u2019 And I started chuckling, but you know, in a way, you have to define how goals are set in order to make them achievable. \u201cAnd so, this is part of life\u2019s lesson, and when I walked into that room with the team in 1982, and I asked them if there\u2019s a championship in this room, they didn\u2019t know what a championship was. It was my job to define that over the years. Eventually, this became an expected norm: this is what we\u2019re going for. Whether we made it or not, it was the goal of the program. Winning championships gave it legitimacy, but there\u2019s a lot of kids who didn\u2019t win it, and there\u2019s a lot of programs that never had that opportunity. But that doesn\u2019t mean it can\u2019t be their goal.\u201d
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